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What Millennials Want Most: A Career That Actually Matters

This article is by Barry Salzberg, the global chief executive officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.

The Occupy Wall Street movement may have faded in the past few months, but its core beliefs have stuck with tomorrow’s talent.

It’s tempting to think that these grass-roots sentiments will run their course, but my interactions with young professionals around the globe, as well as our own research, tell me there is something larger at work, and that business leaders need to pay attention.

Occupy’s core issue, damaged trust in business, remains strong with millennials—strong in interviews, strong on college message boards, and strong on social networking sites. This fundamentally different recession has created a potentially fundamentally different generation.

As digital natives and emissaries from the future, the millennials hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of tomorrow. Researchers predict that this year there will come to be more mobile devices than humans on the planet. We need this digital generation to join us in unleashing the potential of all that mobility and access to information. And they will, but only if they believe our organizations can offer them careers that, well, actually matter. Given that Deloitte’s member firms will recruit 250,000 people around the world over the next five years, this obviously resonates with me. And I believe it matters to any leader thinking about the future.

The good news is that business as a whole has a good record to point to, an all-true story about the many things we do to make the world a better place. Jobs and homes. Opportunity and security. Breakthrough new ideas like the iPad. The works.

Never mind the still sluggish job market. In their insistence on social principle, many millennials are not driven by money or success in quite the way their parents were. This generation wants to know what your organization stands for in improving society, what it stands for in action, as opposed to blowing smoke. Millennials want to know how they will make a positive difference in the world if they join your business, not by wearing a colorful T-shirt on a special project once a year but in their actual work.

Did I mention that this media-savvy generation is also jaded and suspicious? Unimpressed by title, well-traveled, and immune to P.R. in the old sense? To anyone who imagines their heartstrings can be nimbly plucked, good luck.

In August 2011, for example, students at top American schools—Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford—were complaining about their peers going into finance and consulting, professions in which 25% of Yale grads launch their careers. They called such choices a “brain drain,” or “a tragedy of wasted minds,” as one Dartmouth undergrad put it. Deloitte signed up some 49,000 minds last year, so naturally this got my attention.

We did some original research and discovered that these attitudes, conflicted as they can be, also reflect remarkable optimism and resilience, including an admirable willingness to tackle, head-on, society’s biggest issues. A slacker generation this is not.

My organization examined the opinions of 1,000 millennials at Deloitte member firms regarding the impact of business on society. We found that more than half of them believe that in the future business will have a greater impact than anyone else in solving society’s biggest challenges. And 86% of them believe business will have at least as much potential as government to meet society’s challenges. Clearly, taken as a whole, millennials do not see business as a waste.

Yes, employment remains a challenge, in the U.S. and especially in parts of Europe suffering from double-digit unemployment, such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. True, more needs to be done to align education and training with today’s jobs, and my organization, among many, is striving to do just that. But to be realistic, it will take the bulldozer of business, going at full throttle, to get us out of the ditch. To do that effectively, business needs to move past the denial stage and get everyone on board, including the new generation of workers, with all their energy, curiosity, new skills, and passion.

Indeed, if you heed the details of this research, tomorrow’s leaders are telling us that they believe they can actually change the world, fiscally and socially—operating within the system. They want to play a part personally, not just in pro bono work but through the work they do every day.

In an effort to do just that, our member firms’ professionals are fully engaged. For example, in Korea they are creating new efficiencies in the nation’s IT infrastructure and thereby helping a developing country use inexpensive technology to create micro-businesses. In South Sudan, after a long civil war, we are helping create social structures from taxation to governance that support peace and stability.

Another part of the picture is the large number of women now in the global workforce: fully half, driven by better education and aided by the steady wind of social forces. Businesses are hungry for this talent.

In turn, greater economic equality between men and women has been shown to reduce poverty rates, boost GDP, and lead to better governance. That kind of social change, driven as much by business as by government or nongovernmental organizations, is bringing major benefits to the next wave of emerging economies in the Middle East, Africa, India, and elsewhere.

In short, we need to do more to connect the dots for millennials, showing them the deeper global dynamics of the business enterprise. Damaged trust in business is one side effect of the events of recent years. Like all our stakeholders, our digital natives need to know that they can trust us with their future, and that, like them, we’re ready to keep changing the world.

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There is one significant issue not mentioned here – media. If businesses are serious about engaging Millenials, they need to seriously engage the media first. They constantly portray businesses and executives as evil villians and employees as oppressed serfs (unless they’re in rebellion of course). This stereotypical view pervades movies, TV, internet, and advertising. Without some change in media, Millenials will not be eager to engage in a “meaningful career” in any business. Of course, it doesn’t help to have banking scandals and ponzi scheme promoters peppering the media today either.

But businesses should put together a team to advocate and work for fair portrail of businesses and executive in all ways possible. The tobacco industry effectively recruited a whole generation of consumers in the 40s and 50s by targeting high profile celebrities and production houses to use their products in movies and TV. OK, perhaps tobacco isn’t a “respectable” industry anymore but you gotta acknowledge their ability to influence billions of consumers with subtle but effective media methods.

“Like all our stakeholders, our digital natives need to know that they can trust us with their future” In return, the digital natives need to know that you and all other stakeholders trust them with your futures.

Being part of this generation myself I do appreciate the insightful article, and can associate with what is said. It will also be foolish to bluntly challenge the wisdom that Barry Salzberg has gained through experience and research on the matter.

Although money and success remain alluring benefits to a corporate career the fact that your input to a project has a valuable effect on society does make it easier to burn the midnight oil.

As a ‘soon to graduate’ South African Industrial and Systems Engineer I have the skills and passion to address the gaps found in my continent but must admit that although I see the dots, I need the guidance and structure of business to connect them.

I am thankful for Deloitte’s interest in South Sudan as I have made an acquittance with a member of this team. I now wait with eager anticipation for the opening of a Deloitte consulting division in South Sudan, that I may play my part. (If someone knows who to speak to, to speed this up please let me know.)

Thank you for this article, I hope that many others will follow the trend and that both parties will see that as we align passion and structure to achieve a common goal the possibilities are endless.

“Never Doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world… Indeed it is the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead

I agree that meaning in work is so important. While most other generations are just realizing that having work with meaning is a possibility, younger generations take it as a given. They are not so content to do work disconnected from their own personal mission or passions.

As a life coach working with people to help them find what they want to do with their lives, I can see first hand the enormous power to innovate and change the world that can be harnessed if business works to engage people’s minds and passions, and not just demand their physical output. It really is a win/win for everyone. http://wishingwellcoach.com/wordpress/?p=301

“Making a positive difference” is tricky business because difference-making is the byproduct of a meaningful life or what I call being an on-purpose person. Making a positive difference is a noble and worthy result, but by itself it often leads to short-cuts on character development which can create ethical pitfalls for all involved.

Fundamentally, it is a personal leadership challenge – an inside job. Be a person with a purpose of being (rather than doing), and the work becomes an expression of that purpose. Life itself is making a difference rather than only the work.

Begin by really knowing oneself: articulating one’s personal purpose, vision, missions, and values. This is the basic stuff of business strategy applied personally. Unfortunately, we live in a Tower of Business Babel where this precious words are utterly confused, used synonymously when they are related but not synonyms, and we’re doing business as the speed of a text.

For brevity, let’s assume a person now knows their purpose, vision, missions, and values for his or her life. Now comes the really hard part – bringing it into expression in every area of life, including work. This alignment and then integration (not balance) is simply being on-purpose.

Purpose is a profoundly spiritual and personal experience – generally a taboo topic in the political / diversity correctness of the big business community. Such a wide berth speaks more to the awkwardness and lack of training of the business leaders rather than the topic itself. Here’s where small business currently has a major strategic advantage over big business. Their corporate culture isn’t policy-based but person-to-person.

We’re heading into the Age of Purpose and Meaning – the age beyond the Knowledge Age. Done right, work becomes a spiritual expression or platform for one’s purpose in which service to others rather than “me-ness” creates the positive difference making experience.

Be On-Purpose! Kevin W. McCarthy Author, The On-Purpose Person, Making Your Life Make Sense

Often a role “matters” – for example improving energy efficiency, as the result of many individuals effort. For one person to matter they must realise (“materialise”) results.

This is often done best, not by focusing on the individual, but on the team.

Soduring the 1980s when greed was good, the ego was all.

Now perhaps, when the team (team global) really needs a win, interpersonal issues such as moral hazard, trust, credibility and humility mean more. This is where we are weak, where the public feel bretayed and where we need to see change from leaders. A dose of humility might help !

See also http://blog.kwiqly.com/2012/07/too-smart-to-be-humble-5-steps-down.html .

Great article Barry, thanks for sharing. Based on my own experience, being a bit of a cross over on the X/Y generations, I feel like the focus is more on meaningful work more so than socially responsible work. I am not even sure its really a millenial vs non-millenial preference as much as it is a matter of personality and motivation. At the end of the day, very few people want a “brain drain” job but the definition of such a job is different for everyone.

For some people who are driven by predictability, consistency, structure and more linear thinking, a finance or accounting job may be perfect for them. They get fired up by numbers, analysis and output.

For others (like me) that seems like total hell and I would rather something that is dynamic requiring non-linear thinking, strategy development and coming up with better questions to get to better answers. This could mean a number of different things in the context of a “job description”.

I think you nailed it on “connecting the dots”. Business leaders need to make sure to clearly articulate why the business exists and what the workers individual position means to the company as a whole. Just like the old story of JFK touring NASA where he met a janitor and asked him what his job was and the janitor responded “Sir, I’m helping to put a man on the moon!”. That level of clarity and singularity of purpose is what all people (millenial or otherwise) need desperately!

OK, you addressed millenials and you touched upon women. What about boomers? In a business world “hungry for talent,” here’s a group with both talent and experience. And we’re still hungry for meaning too.